I was first introduced to Jesse Malmed’s work at a screening hosted by Denver’s Cinema Contra in November 2015. The screening was a retrospective of-sorts, presented at GLOB—one of the city’s important DIY venues, which has since been shuttered. Caught in the wake of Denver’s push toward real estate development and gentrification, GLOB was made more vulnerable during the attack on DIY spaces that rippled across the country following the tragic Ghost Ship fire in Oakland in 2016.

Actually, the Cinema Contra screening introduced me to Malmed’s work in person and included the chance to see some of his performative works live—as they are intended to be seen. But I’ve known of Malmed’s work for years and, in following his projects online, I knew him to be an artist who moved around, who DID stuff. I’ve always been taken with his organizing, his unique curating approach, and his ability to make things happen. What follows is a chat between Malmed and myself, passed back-and-forth online between November of 2015 and July 2017.

Christina Battle: I’d like to start with some questions about your curating and organizing. In addition to programming screenings for media exhibition venues across the U.S. like the Nightingale Cinema (Chicago), Microscope Gallery (Brooklyn), Artists' Television Access (San Francisco), among many others, you have also organized numerous stand-alone events and exhibitions. Live To Tape: Artist Television Festival looks at artists working with material and ideas within the medium of television; Hallwalls 2 was a temporary exhibition space in Chicago; Trunk Show, which you co-curated with Raven Falquez Munsell, commissioned artists to design bumper stickers for display on a mobile gallery/car; Western Pole, a platformist poster-project with works displayed on a single street post (located at approximately 902 N. Western Avenue) in Chicago; and Deep Leap Microcinema, a screening series and zine based on thematic programming. I wonder if you could situate your relationship to organizing and curating within your overall practice. What place does curating hold within your practice? How does it interact with your artmaking practice (or not)? How do you differentiate between the two?

Jesse Malmed: There has always been something exciting to me about how the various art worlds through which I became interested and invested in art presumed a level of messy and rhizomatic horizontality in which creation-education-exhibition-production-curation-criticism are all shared responsibilities. Coming up in punk/DIY/whatever scenes, it has always felt part and parcel of the deal, that to have a sustaining scene everyone has a lot of roles to play, bear a lot ofhyphens. That said, there are people that are better at programming or better at artmaking or teaching or writing and some of these tasks get distributed evenly—or appropriately—and others not so much.

I approach my curatorial and platformist roles with the same spirit that I bring to my artmaking practice and, steadily, those lines have become ever-perforated. There are times when my role feels very much like a facilitator—booking the show, updating the website, preparing the press release, making program notes, focusing the projector, setting up chairs, saying where the bathrooms are, what comes next and conducting the Q-and-A. I love doing this—though I’m certainly always looking to improve—and feel a responsibility to this kind of activity. At the same time, I’m always trying to think of new and interesting ways to destabilize and open up the potentials of exhibition.

I also think of these things in terms of the ir/responsibilities of each role. I know it’s a little cheeky, but it’s important to me that artist be first amongst these hyphenates for many reasons but mostly that it carries with it a responsibility toward newness, toward shifting and challenging modes, etc. Good curatorial and critical work certainly have enormous creative potentials, but there are also moments when a work or artist deserves a straightforward, careful (so curators know I know the root) presentation, necessitating a conventional but comprehensive approach. Sometimes you go to a museum to see the work, not the cleverness of the curator shining through. Other times, though, it’s much more invigorating to see something done boldly, or badly, or wrong. As a programmer, sometimes I’m there to host an artist, to ensure that everything looks good, that people come out, that the program notes don’t have typos, etc. Other times, I try to consider these same tasks as intentional creative sites for playing with established exhibition aesthetics and codes.

I’m drawn to the histories of artist-run spaces and the flexibility those spaces allow. Each of these projects has had separate contexts that drew them into being and kept my interest. Deep Leap—the zine—began with my friend Adam and then included my partner Raven as a way to organize material and friends and put something into the world. We were living in San Francisco as freshly minted Bachelors and I was bummed to see how many friends who just months before were artists, filmmakers, writers, sociologists, etc. felt like those interests were untenable, that it was time to grow up or whatever. So we started making this zine for which we sent out prompts (like “Andorran/Spench,” “Things Named After People,” and—one I just rediscovered and have since used a number of other times—“Sitcom Sets”) and people sent back short-shorts, poems, texts, drawings, collages, etc. We held some release parties where friends would perform, we’d show videos, and we’d pour 40’s alongside two buck chuck into small plastic cups (and emptied jars). It felt good and was an exciting way to bring people along with us into a headspace of creating. Also, I’ve tried to be in the habit of surrounding myself with generous geniuses and a wide range of inspiring folks, so that helps.

As you may have heard, instead of San Francisco becoming more welcoming to artists with landlords agreeing that zines and no-profit art zones were more vital than raising rents, they felt the exact opposite way. We noticed that all our friends who were the same age/etc. that had moved to Portland had started bands, had started to take their drumming, drawing, and farming more seriously, and seemed to have an extra few days a week. So we moved up there.

While in Portland, I shifted the focus of Deep Leap to time-based events. From the beginning, the nomadic Deep Leap Microcinema was devoted to pairing thematically-curated screenings with related, commissioned performances. Often these were musical—for the first real show, Palimpsests, our friend Jeffrey Brodsky created a lush, swirling re-envisioning of our friend and his then-bandmate Jonah Adels’ weirdo bedroom record Songs From Our Nuclear Winter, and then our friend Banjo Performs Keyboard jangled a shambling, outlaw country veneer onto the outsider-pop stylings of his ex-Big Boo bandmate Keyboard. Other shows were less incestuous, but each featured performances and screenings and borrowed space.

Later in Portland I joined the much more august Cinema Project, where I learned the finesse of running a screening series. The programming, projection, calendars, etc. has always been gutsy, impeccable, and pristine with Cinema Project. They remain one of my favorite moving image exhibition programs, continually proving that old adage about how doing it yourself means you can do it better. [Ed. Note: After 13 years of programming in Portland, Cinema Project held its last screening in February 2017.]

Documentation of Danielle Campbell’s work at Western Pole, June 2017.

Sometimes an idea that I have starts to make more sense once it includes other people. Shower Songs, Western Pole—these are projects that began more fully as something that I was interested in doing on my own, that grew much richer once I imagined all the other ways these forms and ideas could be inhabited and the joy of offering even a modest space to someone I admire. These are—to me—different from Trunk Show. Western Pole is a purely platformist project. My role there is instigating, installing, and instagramming. While I’ve been inviting artists, I’m also excited that the project can function openly (if a little secretly).

Raven—who not so incidentally is my partner of many years and my most favorite person in the whole world—and I started Trunk Show because we both do a lot of curating and art-thinging and wanted to do something together. We have long longed for some kind of space, but didn't have space for a space. We did own this funny car (passed down from my little sister and our friend Ari before that) and when the idea of commissioned bumper stickers came to us we were ecstatic.

The Live to Tape Artist Television Festival was never supposed to become an annual festival. I'm hoping to figure out some ways that it can pop up in different contexts, but it was in part created as a way of thinking through and embodying different possibilities for what a “film” festival could be. Something with a wide-breadth (40-plus years), that feels curated, with internal logics and rhymes and that also incorporates performance and paratextual, non-screen elements. The festival was not intended to be comprehensive, but to function as a weeklong exploration of a series of ideas and to imagine a world in which television is shared experience and none of it is garbage.

Battle: I’m curious to hear more about this: “We have long longed for some kind of space, but didn't have space for a space” and the limitations you might find with the realities of having a physical space as it relates to artistic/curatorial/whatever freedom. Perhaps this is a contemporary condition—a lack of space. Some of your projects have found creative and interesting ways to deal with this lack; Trunk Show and Western Pole are great examples.

Malmed: It’s a balance, right? Those with their own spaces, where things are always happening, have to deal with being beholden or bound to that space. At the same time, there are lots of exhibition ideas that are hard for an expanded us to manifest because maybe someone’s sculpture doesn’t make sense as a poster on a pole, or a symposium set in our car wouldn’t have any room for an audience. I spend some amount of time each week dreaming of having a space while also knowing that perhaps that’s not the right pursuit for me, especially in a place like Chicago. As far as things going wrong, I’ve had numerous ideas that I wasn’t able to put into the world because I was unable to convince what I thought was the appropriate venue.

Battle: I’d also like to hear more about this idea of the role of artist being at the forefront of all the other hyphens (artist-curator, artist-organizer, etc).

Malmed: I think this is related to a sense of boundlessness that I want to approach. To me, a big part of why a person chooses “artist” as their “job” is that it brings with it incredible freedom. You make art, you make your own choices, you wake up whenever. Obviously, this is complicated by very simple things, but the idea holds. I’m frustrated by movements toward self-definition that slip into self-denial. It’s important for artists to be able to articulate their work and their interests, but the move toward branding —“I make large, color-field paintings whose titles are inversions of retrograde cartographic classifications”—can feel like an unnecessary series of limitations. If you’re just going to make one thing, why not make something useful, like shoes? I hope—through the various shoes I don, as artist, curator, educator, etc.—that I can open up each of these practices a bit. It’s good to recognize and interrogate one’s own fascinations, skills, and where we default to, but assuming these are one’s essential qualities and questions, it may make sense to not limit how they’re delivered. That is all to say, some ideas are better done alone and some are better when you invite people in. This is an obvious question but one that has guided a number of works. There’s a Bruce Conner quotation that I found a few years ago and wrote down on the first scrap of paper I could find: the former is “I use the term artist as a functional excuse for my behavior” and the latter was an envelope from the IRS.

Battle: One of the things I find most amazing about being a media artist is the incredible connectivity the community shares despite geographic separation. Like you, I’ve moved around a lot (when this interview started I lived in Denver and am now up in London, Ontario, which is close to Toronto), and I am increasingly blown away by just how connected and supportive the greater media arts community is. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this or any experiences you’d be willing to share.

Malmed: It’s true! I know that part of my early allegiance with the experimental film and video art worlds came from a political and social feeling of community and sub/counter-culture, of the politics inherent to a media ecology outside of the corporate behemoths, of the immateriality and possible political implications of open access. Sometimes these qualities exist more fully in the fertile minds of converts than in our lived experience, but beginning from this space is a good start. Even as a kid I was interested in the social ties between my favorite artists. It’s important, of course, to continually problematize and examine the biases and -clusions that are perpetuated by scenes/communities/cultures, to be aware that these words in their essences connote exclusivity.

Being able to tour and do shows relatively inexpensively (I remember not to complain to my capital-s Sculptor friends too much when I have to pay for a bus ticket or need a new hard-drive) feels like an important part of our role in the time-space negotiation. As an artist I know I’m unlikely to ever make a living by selling whatever it is I do or am. We rarely hear about poems breaking auction records. That said, no one frowns on me for showing the same exact show in two cities in a week—and not even doing it as a conceptual move.

So, yes, I think these communities can be incredible and vital, but I also see lots of analogues in other communities. Without being too tangential, I’m especially drawn to hybrid forms and to considering one’s work in both local and global terms. I think it’s important that experimental film/whatever communities not be too cloistered, not hide themselves from the work other contemporary practitioners are doing in other fields. I’m also pickled by the contemporary trend in museum spaces of artists discovering in (luminous scare quotes) the magic and materiality of film; I get the frustration experts in any field feel when a budgeted, interdisciplinary dilettantism encroaches on their field. Equally, though, we risk missing out on a lot of interesting conversations and novel approaches by decrying anything made with a paintbrush as bourgeois object fetishism and anything with actors as counter-revolutionary propaganda.

Battle: Maybe a way to talk about the cloistered nature of some “experimental film/whatever communities” is to also come back to this, which I find interesting and personally identify with strongly: “my early allegiance with the experimental film and video art worlds came from a political and social feeling of community and sub/counterculture, of the politics inherent to a media ecology outside of the corporate behemoths, of the immateriality and possible political implications of open access” and your earlier mentioning of “coming up in punk/DIY/whatever scenes,” which I also share in my background. The differences within the experimental film community become more defined for me the longer I’m at it. I suspect for myself this also stems from my personal interest in and dedication to DIY (or, more appropriate—DIWO/DIT).

Malmed: Right. There’s something necessarily alienating (is this the word I want to use?) about involving oneself in radical communities and pursuits. There’s a long history of aligning with sub- and counter-cultures and then being surprised when mainstream culture isn’t interested. I think of a goof with a friend that involves a few people complaining about people not buying their complicated, anti-capitalist ephemeral work. Working on the margins assumes a whole range of problems—invisibility, accidental elitism, precarity—but ultimately those are trumped by the strong, supportive bonds of others with equally bravely and adamantly niche beliefs. The most interesting work is almost always coming from the margins: this is where cultural innovation and investigation works best. I’m also very much opposed to some notion that there are ten genius artists and thousands of hacks. I am constantly invigorated by just how much interesting work is being made, everywhere, all the time. There’s some kid holed up in a basement in Birmingham that’s about to drop the hottest noise-rap tape/snapchat; there are incredible performances that explode with 20 people in a room and whimper on a stage; people are endlessly creative in finding small cracks in the system to make work for and from (in the last couple days I watched teens freestyling and excitedly pitching invitations to their open mic at some random café in an unhip part of town, put a poster of my friend’s work on a telephone pole, saw a program of inspiring experimental documentaries from a Danish artist, spent time in several different classrooms talking through what art is and can be, put up an object-oriented talk show exhibition in a magazine store and screened/performed in a rad little artist-run everything space in a city that needs more).

Battle: Much of your practice necessitates you being present when work travels to different cities. Even your single channel video works at times incorporate elements of live performance. Can you speak to this necessity for yourself as a maker, as a person? Why is it important for you to incorporate tours into the exhibitions you curate?

Malmed: Part of this is trying to make things difficult for myself, trying to destabilize the cinematic space through liveness and site-specificity. I also imagine no small part of it must be because I don’t want to miss anything and want to be everywhere.

Certain pieces are designed to have performances inside of them—mine and other artists’—or to have some other small nod to the uniqueness of that moment. Both Do Voices (2013) and the new Self-Titled (Rough Cut) (2015-) have to change with each screening, which is both an exciting proposition and a pretty silly way to make movies. Do Voices felt like it had to incorporate liveness. Its central concerns are the ties between accents and place; impressions of an impressionist; constituencies and communities; bootlegs, access, and mediation.

I wish I was able to tour more. I really love being on the road. I like sleeping on couches, I like staying up late with new people, I like experiencing others experiencing my work for the first time and in new places, I like being driven around by friends new and old and shown the things about their town they think I’d like to know, I like reconnecting with people that despite my great protestations have all decided to strew themselves widely and let me do the same. Compared to musicians or the more functionally itinerant, I feel like most of my traveling is on the CTA [Chicago Transit Authority]. I’m sure if I were spending 80 nights a year in other places I’d start to feel burnt out, but I don’t and I haven’t.

Again, I’m an advocate for a horizontal, diffuse notion of culture. I don’t think you have to live in New York or Los Angeles to have a sense of what’s possible in culture. That said, having access to other people and other work is enormously important.

Without being rude about one town or another, I’ve spent time in a number of smaller cities whose music/performance/moving image scenes are much more interesting and vital than their visual (let’s say wall and floor) art worlds. I think this has to do with how well these works travel (or don’t). Ann Arbor or Denver or Tucson (or most any college, for that matter) can access some of the best work around in those fields. It’s much harder to convince a great painting exhibition to get in the back of a van.

As soon as I’d gotten used to how annoyed I was with the big city chauvinist (perhaps someone who lives in New York has made someone who happens to be reading this feel like they didn’t exist because they lived in another city or worse, a town or village or somewhere rural), I became more aware of that medium-city hybrid, the one who wears their irrelevance as a badge, who believes anything emerging from a city with an art school to be bogus. They say: “small town hipsters are the worst.”

Maybe the answer, as per usual, is something politic like, good work can come from anywhere; cities are good because there are more people there but sometimes bad because of how many people there are. In this moment, my work is both unpopular and requires a public so I think it’s stuck in cities that have enough people that statistically an audience will amass around a performance at dawn or an opening for a bumper sticker or a screening with no movies.

Battle: This makes me think about how vital the internet has been in democratizing what we as media artists see and have access to, how we are able to share work and know one another and invite one another to our respective left/right/north/south of center communities and how it has given greater voice to those living outside of “center.” It also makes me think about television as the internet’s one-time potential predecessor. This might be a nice segue into discussing some of your video works.

There are many references to television within your work, not only our collective understanding of television and television shows but also to the seclusion that television can create. Earlier you mentioned how “Do Voices felt like it had to incorporate liveness.” In addition to the geographic specificity you discuss as being critical to the work, the balance of incorporating live interactive performance within a piece containing so many television references makes me think about television’s ability to be both a means for connection and seclusion at the same time.

Malmed: Some element of my filmmaking practice concerns the cinematic apparatus that is its exhibition. I’m not as concerned with cameras or the materiality of film as some of our historical forebears, but rather the codes of the cinema, as in the semi-public places where movies are shown. To screen means both to show and to conceal. Most screenings take place in a supposed non-space that, once activated, is meant to privilege our ears, eyes, and brains while the rest of our body—and anything beyond the periphery of the screen—is assumed inconsequential. I’ve had wonderful experiences that feel this way, of course, but I’m also sure that there are interesting ways to puncture the membrane of the screen. Conque (2013) has a small moment in which I—or a surrogate—twirl a flashlight’s beam over the screen and into the theatrical space. It’s a short section, but never fails to surprise me (and hopefully others) with its flirtation with the edge of the screen, the ceiling and the space we’ve all assembled to quietly face in one direction.

Performances in the midst of the cinematic space—especially unannounced within a program—serve to remind us not simply of our bodies in space but of the fleeting specificity of this moment. This is the only time you’ll be here this time.

Television promises us a sense of connectedness and its own form of liveness, even as we watch them separately and (now) at different times.

Never Mind the Smell (for Jennifer Reeder) / Jesse Malmed

Battle: Never Mind the Smell (for Jennifer Reeder) (2012) also speaks to this idea of liveness. It seems to be a performance for camera that wasn’t exactly meant for the camera.

Malmed: That piece is an homage to—and let’s say meant for—my grad school advisor, a Weird Al-ing of her much-lauded (and better) work. Mostly, then and now, that video is about two things: I love Jennifer Reeder, of course, and I think there’s value in taking a quick, silly idea I wrote down/lost/forgot/found (a common occurrence) and then executing it, just to see what it looks like in a different form than my handwriting on a scrap of paper. I like that piece but haven’t really tried to show it anywhere or to anyone (beyond just posting it online); which is an interesting part of having a practice with a lot of public-ness.

Most of my performances take place in public, whether as choirs, leading Conversational Karaoke, doing occasional comedy, things that look and feel more like poetry readings, live video things and other ways of talking and singing in front of people. I’m not hyper-aware of my body in those moments and am much more attuned to how I can embody an exploratory approach to language, as composition and improvisation, as jokes and poems, as presence.

Wreading / Jesse Malmed

Battle: The scrolling green text in Wreading (2012) also forces us to consider this idea of liveness and time unfolding. As the text rewinds back over itself, I started thinking about how my own viewing of video works online differs greatly from within more cinematic settings. The first couple of times I watched Wreading, I found myself pausing and rewinding to watch various sections again.

Malmed: As much as the cinematic space is important to me, I’m also in love with the idea of a moving image work as something a person can have and can hold and can shake up and reconsider. I’ve said this before, usually in the context of the works’ opacity, but I’ve always loved work like John Ashbery’s, that has a pleasure of an initial listening or reading, but that asks us to read and re-read and reconsider to come to more solutions to its puzzles. I want the work to work on its first go, but my hope (and part of why things are freely available online) is that like a tattered library copy, a person can start from somewhere new or click back to see if Waldo really was there (he was, but in another one) or determine parts they want to go back to, to temporarily reimmerse themselves in, even as other parts may feel skippable at some point.

Wreading / Jesse Malmed

Battle: In Wreading the line between the real and mediated real through references to television repeat across the work. From the intertitles framed like answers from Jeopardy—the first of which tells us “this isn’t it,” to the constant disruptions that pull aesthetically and musically from late-night TV, to the many staged images complete with stock photo watermarks, Wreading draws attention to the blurry lines we continually walk between the real and unreal in contemporary society.

We hear Tuli Kupferberg talk about one of the American myths he learned in school—“that everyone ha(s) a chance to become president,” a statement which has taken on more profound meaning of late. Wreading gets me stuck wondering: is anything real?

Malmed: One of my old favorites, Tim Kinsella, was one of our final Trunk Show artists. In the prepared remarks before the unveiling of his sticker, he repeated the line “as real as it is unreal” to describe the capitalist system, our relationship with media and the world itself. It struck me not just because I’ve always loved when a seeming paradox—something being clarified by or containing its opposite—articulates an idea but because it matches onto my own lived experience. From a very young age, I can remember long, drawn-out conversations with my parents about how if we are to believe life to be illusory, to be a cosmic dream in which our actions and lives constitute the momentary illusions of being discrete (this atom next to this atom, when in the next millennia they’ll be jumbled anew, like an endless cycle of sand castles), then why do we have to do homework? If this whole thing is a dream, why do I have to wake up so early? Being raised some complicated, po-mo version of Buddhist while carrying a Marxian historical materialist sense of the world (the latter of which I didn’t identify as such until later), means a continual confusion between the real and unreal. Between our responsibilities to the material world and its denizens through our shared connection and fate… Like recycling isn’t going to save the world but what kind of schmuck throws a useful, regenerating glass away? There’s a small part of me that feels dizzy (dwarfed, of course, by rage, fear, and incredulity) about Trump, about his wholesale disavowal of our shared understanding of truth and reality, that so many of our shared theories about the subjective, the diffuse, and the slippery have finally found their stage. Disastrously, these tools are being used as weapons by a billionaire bully bigot whose delusions have been magnified to a monstrous level. And whose vision of the world is now taken up by some mass of people who see an articulation of their most base fears and aggression in a scary, powerful way.

Wreading, the title, is taken from Charles Bernstein who uses it as a way of describing creative reading and the ways that meaning is generated and shaped by an active audience.

Battle: Landscape Portrait (2015) unfolds as if entirely mediated through the framework of television. It’s a late-night portrait complete with opening and closing credits, intermission, live band, and interviews (with plants). Incorporating “live” streamed recordings, this piece also questions the separation between the real and the unreal. I noticed, while watching online, that I kept writing “this is real life,” as if to convince myself that that’s what I was seeing at certain moments; as if there was a difference between me watching the shots you shot versus the shots you found.

Malmed: When I first showed Landscape Portrait to Bruce Jenkins and James Benning, who were co-teaching the class I made it for, they each remarked it was “like an anti-landscape film.” This was close to my intention, but I was more interested in trying to think through the way images of landscape are constructed. Obviously landscape has fueled innumerable beautiful, fascinating works that reveal the places we live and don’t, and that allow us to stare awingly into the vastness of both our own experiences and experiences we’ll never have (what is it like to be a tree? What kind of knowledge does the elevation, temporariness, and temporal-sensitivity of a cloud look like? What kind of animal am I?). At the same time, these images are neither neutral nor separate from culture at large. Peter Hutton was one of my mentors and I realized quickly that not only was I ill-equipped to make work like his, I didn’t have to. Nobody out-Huttons Hutton, we’re just lucky to have overlapped with that vision. I like to think out loud about mediation and hope that little film does a bit of work toward engaging both in the beauty of the place it was created—at Ox-Bow [School of Art and Artists’ Residency]—and complicating the various ways that beauty is instrumentalized and articulated. It’s like that real/unreal thing, the piece is about a kind of contranym that’s suturing you into that blissful feeling of psychedelic water-staring and then pulling the camera back to reveal the stage lights positioned to create that effect.

Re-reading and reconsidering this, I’m also thinking of how the answer (and those same impulses) relate to How to have your / own television show! / (you already do) (2016), which uses a bootleg of one of Peter’s films to frame one of the video’s major sections, recasting it as a sitcommune, a That ‘70s Show that maps onto the 70s I grew up hearing about. Mediation and meditation, an audience of mono mano applause, the surveillance stream as unending duration, feckless editors and reckless overexposure.

Published September 7, 2017

ABOUT THE AUTHOROriginally from Edmonton, Christina Battle is currently based in London, Ontario. Her works are often inspired by the role of official and non-official archives, our notions of evidence, and explore themes of history and counter-memory, political mythology, and environmental catastrophe. Especially interested in how our engagement with media shapes our understanding and interpretation of information, her current research focuses on thinking critically about the tools of technology, especially social media, as part of contemporary language and considering the role that they are playing in changing not only the way that we receive but also in how we expect visual information to be. Christina is a contributing editor to INCITE Journal of Experimental Media, and current collective projects include: re:assemblage with Scott Miller Berry; and, MICE MAGAZINE.